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Calling Perl

I know (and love and hate) Perl since ages; I've written dozens of scripts in Perl to automate all sorts of things, locally as well as remotely; I have crafted and polished my own collection of Perl modules… so any language I use, however good it may be in its own right, should be flexible enough to allow integration with Perl.

Fortunately, Perl has a pretty straightforward and stable embedding interface. I have used this interface during the last four years or so to bind Perl to a few scripting/macro languages I use (or used to use): there is one page for people coming from an AutoHotkey or AutoIt3 background and another for Lua. The latter is the latest in the series and, thanks to Lua's amazing flexibility, has the most seamless support so far.

(However, the end of my love-hate relationship with Perl is now in sight: Lua is a pretty good scripting language in itself; with some tweaks to the language and a vastly enlarged library it could well be a viable solution to my Perl predicament. Well, I toyed with that idea for a while… and finally decided to try it. The result is a small but powerful scripting language: Idle. As I have to eat my own dog food, almost all my scripting is now done in Idle.)